DoctorMo's Blog

Our venerable friend Jono Bacon has posted an interesting blog post concerning the outcome of the bug to enable the nonfree installation of Flash on Ubuntu. It would have manifested itself in the installer, by having the nonfree checkbox switch on by default.

1. The problem: We can not have what we want in the default install.
2. The current solution: Provide a set of proxy packages which can install the functionality after the installation, moving the liability and problems from Canonical to the user.
3. The problem with the current solution: It requires manual user interaction.
4. Problem with checkbox solution: It’s against Ubuntu policy and the Technical Board Voted it down.

I’m a big proponent of “nonfree offsetting” (few people are, but I’m sticking to my guns); If Canonical wants to ship nonfree Flash instead of almost fully working GNU Gnash, then they should be willing to offset their balance with adequate investment into the free software alternative; i.e. they should be putting money into Gnash.

It’s funny because I was talking to Rob Savoye, winner of this year’s free software award, at LibrePlanet 2011. Overcoming the technical barriers to finishing Flash 10 support in Gnash, now that there is good documentation from Adobe, is so close. But the only businesses investing in Gnash are embedded systems; systems who need a Flash player to work on ARM and other architectures. Red Hat isn’t one of them, neither is Canonical, and I tire of not hearing from these companies on why they can’t invest more into solving these issues with an economic nudge.

Even if you don’t want to give the money to Rob, then send in your own engineers to get the job done!

Back to Jono: his position is that this issue is down to design. In his world view, installing nonfree Flash is required, it’s the only option and the one that we offer when you install Ubuntu; let’s assume that’s right for a moment. He’s asking designers to mull over how to achieve the right kind of communication to users to encourage them to click on the checkbox: This in itself is a policy paradox.

Anything we do to encourage users to install nonfree, nonessential components, is simply against the Ubuntu policy of shipping free software and encouraging its use. It’s hard to claim that this is a balance of free vs. nonfree with a straight face when your stated aim is to encourage users to install nonfree components.

In the comments to the blog post there are some very good responses from Alan Bell and ethana2, but there are also some comments from users who I think are more pro-compromise then they are pro-free-software. An example from Cleggton (I don’t mean to pick on you personally Cleggton, you’re just the easiest to quote):

If we take philosophy out of the argument for a second, then it seems clear that the users who care whether they are non-free, patent questionable etc are the ones that are most able and informed to uncheck a checkbox. And the ones that aren’t aware of the difference are our new users, who need YouTube just to work out of the box, lets make it work and then lets educate them later.

I hear this kind of appeasement argument an awful lot. Users don’t care (so we’re told) and free software is too hard to achieve. Not everyone of our users is going to care, especially when we so rarely tell them about free and open source software and it’s practical ramifications to them personally. But even that doesn’t make it irrelevant. Our users expect us to care about the things that will benefit them. In fact they expect us to care for them with careful policies. Even if polices get in the way of jam today; they’re there to make sure there’s jam tomorrow and users trust us to make those calls on their behalf.

Besides, you know what your mother always said about getting your own way without putting any work in: It trivialises the issues involved and waylays expectations and the reality of our situation. Then it’s much easier to ignore real solutions like spending the time creating free software and instead continue to make excuses on why we should keep the toxic workarounds like the nonfree Flash player in our ecosystem.

What are your thoughts?

The Ubuntu Massachusetts Local Community team will be hosting a global jam event at the Canonical Lexington office on the 3rd April 2011. We have some car-pooling from Watertown and Alewife for those who are restricted to public transport and lament the cancellation of the Lexington bus on Sundays.

If the weather is good enough, I will cycle up to Lexington along the nice cycle path. You’re also welcome to join me and you should email me directly for details: doctormo@gmail.com; For everyone else, check out the loco page:

Why Mozilla? Why do you continue to pretend FreeDesktop users love to unpack tar files and either compile their software or worse extract a zip file of binaries with duplicated libs into opt. The bad advertising on the website stinks. I’d rather they didn’t bother putting any “Linux” support on their website at all; because all it does it say how much of a geek you need to be to use our software. Making Firefox 4.0 not just useless to most users, but bad for adoption too.

Note: I do know there is a PPA available, but it isn’t visible to any of our users.

With friends like Mozilla, who needs enemies. Your thoughts?

My readers have been telling me that they’ve missed my blog entries where I look into some of the ideas around why Free and Open Source systems fail to gain traction. Today I’ll be conjuring that almost trope, the ‘Chasm’ adoption curve.

Basically the curve describes how any new technology must cross a barren dessert called the chasm from 10% to 20% of market share in order to gain enough share for the adoption to have enough momentum to go on and conquer the whole market.¹ Often in the FreeDesktop ecosystem we see our adoption curve being really, painfully unable to push adoption past 10% of any slice of the market.

The problem we have, I think, is that we fail to create enough compatibility with our “compliments”; also known as all those requirements for tasks we want to do with our computers. I wish to use this to illustrate on one hand a rationale for why pushes into the mainstream fail and why I think peripheral hardware compliments should be a priority for all FreeDesktop programmers.

Every advocate knows that it’s easier to get people who are determined to adopt a Linux based FreeDesktop system than it is to get a windows expert to adopt one. For simple reasons, a self determined user will either make the sacrifices or make the investments to get his compliments compatible. This determination can take the form of either programming upstream new drivers, creating new applications or even just using toxic workarounds to fix an issue that causes things to not work on a fresh install.

Advocates will also often tell you about how successful they’ve been in getting their grandmothers using their FreeDesktop distribution. In fact many of us suspect that Ubuntu and similar distributions are very ready for typical technological Laggards, more than we are ready for early adopters. I think this has much to do with Laggard’s low investment in compliments and subsequent low exceptions about what computers can do for them.

This illustration (right) attempts to show the people to whom our software can be used as an acceptable replacement. In order to improve this, we’d need to either a) improve the attractiveness of the platform to encourage sacrifice of compliments or b) systematically increase compatibility of compliments.

The job of Unity in the new Ubuntu system is to improve attractiveness. An important attribute for sure. But many cycles has gone with a failure to improve compatibility with hardware compliments and this has shown that the gamble for Canonical is that they can improve the attractiveness to such a degree that the sustained investment into compatibility will come from the hardware vendors themselves.

I believe this is a mis-calculation. The hardware vendors will only invest in our ecosystem, when we are attractive compliments to their products. But they aren’t going to invest in their old discontinued products, but only into their new products. This leaves the old products without support and it just so happens that a great number of our main-stream users have made investments into hardware and are not willing to simply buy new hardware just yet. in conclusion, I think we can count on hardware makers providing us with drivers eventually; but for as long as they are not, we should be investing in all their old product lines and making sure they work with our desktop distributions.

This is why I believe it is important that Red Hat and Canonical stop playing around and put money directly into hardware peripheral device support. Printers, scanners, drawing tablets and even phone syncing. Everything that would improve our ability to attract new users over the chasm, by removing the things they would have to sacrifice in order to join us.

What do you think?

¹ For a given sense of market, markets can be sliced and diced into different metrics and general purpose computers can be diced quite a fair few ways. For instance the programmers market is fairly healthy.

I was just reading the interesting article by Glyn Moody about how Mobile apps and the Web are reducing the opportunity for Free and Open Source to take off, right at the time when it should have the biggest basis for doing so.

What’s interesting is that this is another stage in the tragic commons merry-go-round; where publicly minded, forward thinking people set about creating a new ecosystem where ideas can be shared. So impressively more efficient and free to all is the commons that some people come in who use the now free ecosystem to build upon it, by extension the next generation of proprietary garbage that has to be fought away by the next generation of publicly minded people.

We’ve seen it once before when the computer world, which became an open platform, suddenly developed a whole host of parasitic monopoly companies that based their entire closed platforms on top of the older system. And that wasn’t the first time this happened either.

So now we have open source taking the world by storm. Except of course that it’s now undergoing an interesting shift, instead of the cultural shift from passive consumers to active participants; we instead see a new layer of companies who take advantage of the free ecosystem provided to build a new propritary, closed and wholly controlled market for themselves.

Both the Web and Mobile ecosystems are built on open source. Mobile may have a couple of old world encrusted barnacles, but almost all of these platforms are only possible thanks to the ecosystems they’re built upon. Of course they’re also not interested in being a part of creating a new free ecosystem, just a new proprietary one.

Perhaps this is the way it goes, perhaps in 10 years time we’ll be digging ourselves out of this mess to be told that some company is investing a new proprietary system based on open source mobile and open source server code.

Your thoughts?

There has been a lot recently about community fighting. It’s been interesting, but also silly in a lot of ways because it’s a great deal about egos, and you know what happens when the immovable ego meets the unstoppable ego.

Just caught this picture which was made for Ubuntu 10.10 release, I didn’t see it posted to any of the channels, so enjoy:

I was reading over the ever wise Matt Zimmerman and his blog post about Listening to Users; in it he argues that user involvement is a nuanced subject and which approach the developer takes can be highly dependant on the timing, cycle and context of the developing project. Providing examples and some interesting comment.

I basically agree with these ideas, but I wanted to add something more to the economic thought.

I talk about user involvement here; I never mean users who are programmers, users who help support other users or users who turn into developers by their continued project involvement. For that subject see User to Developer evolution.

What developers want from users is fine communication on what the challenges and needs they are facing. They would like as much depth into the issues with as much detail on the specifics which cause issues. This communication is not actually in effort to help the user, but is instead a way to help the developer’s project. The user can see the bug or interaction as a way to get their immediate issue resolved, but the developer will be focused on collecting and filtering the relevant information and making tasks to push the project forwards.

Of course the user will still benefit in due course; but the user’s direct support needs are instead not met by bug reports, but by support type people who may or may not know the aims of the project. The goal for support people is to give the user instructions so that they can mitigate their issue and it isn’t about helping the developer. A wily support person will be able to turn a successful support request into a successful bug report which the developer can process and turn into a permanent solution; on the other hand a user or support person who is used to mitigation strategy, but not used to developer interaction will fail to tie the loose end of why the user needed support in the first place.

This can lead to the dreaded ‘toxic workaround’ which Tim Cole has given a talk about. This is a workaround which becomes so well documented and so ingrained in the culture of the users of a product that they fail to actually tell a developer to fix it. So the problem always remains causing issue for anyone new and causing users to go through extra steps to get usable systems. A good example of this is in Ubuntu support channels when people are asked to and expected to compile anything instead of the code being added to a PPA.

In order the listen to users, I think a developer must know the difference between supporting the user, and supporting upstream development; which may place conflicting demand on the developer’s time. The user for their part, if they get frustrated with reporting bugs that never get to be solved, can lash out at developers, ordering and demanding action should be taken and issues resolved.

Of course, if the user isn’t paying the developer to fix their issues, then the user has no right to ask any developer to work on their issue. The user’s only real power is that they can be of use to the developer’s aims in their project’s future refinement. This is because the developer is the one that holds the majority of the economic power. When a developer talks with a user, it’s clearly with an effort to solve the issues the user has brought up; but I think the developer is always thinking about what fixes will benefit the project the most and which users are the most useful to communicate with to achieve those goals.

What are your thoughts?